Ethico-Aesthetics of Landscape

A Workshop at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Organized by Franca Buss and Hana Gründler
Research Group "Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual" and CAS "Imaginaria of Force"

Landscapes are never neutral. They condense ideas about what counts as natural or pristine, what ought to be preserved, and, from a different angle, they touch upon questions of harmony or violence. Practices of cultivation and care may express ethical ideals, in which inner and outer ‘landscapes’ converge, while simultaneously becoming forms of control, extraction, or exclusion. During two days, ten speakers will discuss how encounters with landscapes—their material, sensory, and aesthetic qualities—shape perception, bodily experience and personal and collective memories. They will also explore how landscapes—as material environments, images, metaphors, or imaginative constructs—participate in shaping ethical orders, articulating imaginaries of coexistence, and negotiating normative conflicts. These relations are neither stable nor universal, but take different forms across historical and cultural contexts.

At a moment of profound environmental change, the workshop investigates these entanglements of aesthetics, ethics and politics from multiple perspectives. It invites us to think of landscape as a dynamic and contested medium through which relationships between human beings and the world they inhabit are continually formed and negotiated.

Venue: Casa Zuccari, Sala Terrena, Via Giuseppe Giusti 49 / Via Gino Capponi 22 50121 Florence & on Zoom (Not Recorded): https://eu02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ZoLiLozFRfqmP04Pox-2qw#/registration

14:30–15:00
Franca Buss and Hana Gründler
Welcome and Introduction

15:00–16:30
I. Care and Control: Preserving Landscape
Chair: Alejandro Nodarse Jammal

Nathalie Dietschy
An Ethico-Aesthetics of Despair? Contemporary Sublime in the Alps

Andrea Mas Garcia
Gardens for Reconstruction. Domesticity, Memory, and the New Picturesque in Postwar Britain

16:30–17:00 Coffee break

17:00–18:30
II. Landscape and Collective Identity
Chair: Mimi Cheng

Rosanna Gangemi
Buried Beneath a Blanket of Snow: Compromised and Insurrectional Germanic Landscapes in Cinematic Arts

Emre Gönlügür
Landscape as Hermeneutical Practice: Blue Anatolia and the Cultivation of Historical Consciousness

09:30–11:45
III. Materializing Landscape. Perception and Ethical Formation
Chair: Oliver Aas

Ruth Sargent Noyes
Portable Landscapes: Animal Pelts and the Ethics of Portraiture in Michel Sittow

Luc Wodzicki
Draining the Val di Chiana, Making 'Paesaggio': Antiquarian Moralizing and Landscape Change in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany

Siyi Zeng
What Counts as Shanshui? Negotiating the Moral Vocabulary of Land in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Travel Painting

11:45–12:45 Tea Time (for speakers only)

12:45–14:15
IV. Landscape, Power, and Entanglement
Chair: Nils Weber

Maria Cecilia Lovato
Constructing Colonial Nature in Fascist Italy: Representation and Strategies of Appropriation

Daniel Moreno
Landscape and Gravity: On Landscape as Entanglement of Forces

14:15–14:30
Concluding Remarks